The way Kelsea Ballerini sees it, people expected her to do two things on her high-wire act of a new album: “One, to go pop,” she says. “And two, to go soft.”
The pop move has been anticipated since this 31-year-old country singer and songwriter emerged about a decade ago in the wake of Taylor Swift, a foundational influence whose early embrace of Ballerini as an heir apparent left many waiting for an inevitable “1989”-style crossover moment of her own.
Says Ballerini with a smile: “They can keep waiting.”
As for the assumption that she’d go “all lovey-dovey,” as the singer puts it? “It’s because they see me happy,” she says — one result of her relationship with the actor Chase Stokes, whom she began dating after the public divorce she chronicled in brutal detail on last year’s Grammy-nominated “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” EP.
“But going pop and getting soft — I very intentionally did not want to do either of those things.”
What she pulls off instead on “Patterns,” which came out Friday, is a pair of difficult tricks: She writes about personal growth with a degree of emotional acuity most songwriters reserve for heartbreak and she makes room for sonic and structural innovations within an unabashedly commercial country-music framework.
Take “First Rodeo,” a sleek midtempo track with twangy guitars and blipping synths in which Ballerini extends a metaphor about getting back on the horse further than you’d think possible without breaking it. Or take “Sorry Mom,” an almost uncomfortably forthright note to her mother about the let’s-call-it-scenic route Ballerini took to becoming “a woman that you’re proud of.” (“Showing up again on Sunday morning / You just made the eggs and turned your head,” she sings, which — oof.)
Then there’s “Wait!”: three minutes of psychological drama in the mind of someone “with a nasty habit leaving before I get left.”
“That’s the last song I wrote for the album,” Ballerini says on a recent morning in a sunny West Hollywood hotel suite. Wrapped in a cozy gray cardigan, she’s sitting cross-legged on a sofa, shoes off, with an overstuffed pillow in her lap. “I felt like it was a missing part of the story, where I was the bad guy, you know? It’s easy to show the unraveling of a relationship. But then you’re like, ‘Oh, wait — part of this was my fault.’”
Ballerini has been in Los Angeles for a few months shooting “The Voice,” the long-running TV singing competition on which she’ll serve as a coach when the show’s next season premieres in February. She used to hate L.A., she says, but given the time she knew she’d be spending here, she resolved to try to make the city feel more like home by renting a place in Los Feliz, which reminds her of her Green Hills neighborhood back in Nashville; she filled the house with the same candles she burns at home and she cooks dinner as many nights as she can. She brought her dog Dibs too, only to discover after getting here that the 9-year-old pup has cancer.
“I just dropped him off for chemo on the way here,” she says, scrolling through the many photos of Dibs on her phone to find one to show off. “It’s gutting, but he’s in good spirits. If I was out here, and this was happening in Nashville, I’d feel so displaced.”
In addition to “The Voice,” Ballerini recently shot a guest-star spot on “Doctor Odyssey,” the new cruise-ship medical drama from producer Ryan Murphy. For years, acting was a “hard no,” she says. “I was terrified of failing and embarrassing myself. But the last couple years, I’ve done a lot of things that I was really scared of, and everything turned out all right.” What links the women Ballerini admires most — “Shania, obviously, Reba, Reese Witherspoon” — is that they’re all “multifaceted,” she says. “They’re women known for doing several things, and that inspires me.”
Even so, “Patterns” showcases the deepening of Ballerini’s core talents as both a singer and a songwriter. In “Two Things,” she finds the ragged edge of her honeyed voice to put across the exasperation involved in a love-hate relationship; in “We Broke Up,” she realizes that closure is available only to those who are ready for it: “I could take a deep dive in the details / I could hide, I could cry till I throw up / Take a stroll, camera roll, old emails / But it’s as simple as, ‘We broke up.’”
After years of screwed-tight Nashville songcraft, Ballerini achieved a more conversational aspect on “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat” that carries through to the new album. (Among her touchstones was SZA’s wonderfully digressive “SOS.”) “I used to think the only great songwriters were the cleverest ones — the Shane McAnallys,” she says, referring to the prolific country hitmaker she describes as “a god” at turning a phrase just so. “But I let that go during ‘Welcome Mat’ — I didn’t even care if things rhymed — and that gave me so much more of a canvas to work with.” Now, she says, a song’s success is less about its hookiness or wordplay than about “whether you go, ‘Oh my God, I literally texted that to my friend yesterday.’”
Kelsea Ballerini will serve as a coach on the next season of “The Voice.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
In person, Ballerini is warm, chatty, slightly gossipy — a veteran star who has retained an essential down-to-earth quality but who also knows through experience how to create a sense of emotional intimacy with an interlocutor.
“Kelsea’s not a pop robot,” says Adam Levine of Maroon 5, the longtime “Voice” coach who’s working with Ballerini on the show’s upcoming season. “Talking to her, you feel like you’re girlfriends.”
Ballerini, who calls herself “a classic oversharer,” grew up in a religious family in Knoxville, Tenn., but moved to Nashville at 15 to pursue music; she signed a record deal a few years later and scored a No. 1 country-radio hit with her debut single, 2014’s earnest “Love Me Like You Mean It.” More chart-toppers followed — including “Dibs,” whose title provided her dog’s name, and “Peter Pan,” about the danger of falling for a charming man-child — as did a Grammy nomination for best new artist.
“I sounded so young,” she says now of her early work. “For the first five years of my career, I still had such a baby face.”
In 2017, when she was 24, Ballerini married Morgan Evans, an Australian country singer she’d met when the two co-hosted an awards show in Brisbane. Her career continued to grow after the wedding — she tried out new sounds with the Chainsmokers and Halsey and cut successful country duets with Shania Twain and Kenny Chesney — yet her relationship with Evans eventually withered.
On “Rolling Up the Welcome Mat,” which came out just a few months after the couple finalized their divorce in late 2022, Ballerini sings that they “had to get drunk to ever really talk”; in one song she recounts a breakfast by herself in Big Sur while her husband was on tour in Europe: “The pictures look pretty,” she sings, “at least they do on your Instagram.” (Evans offered his side of the story in his plaintive 2022 single “Over for You,” in which he sings, “It kills me to know you were drifting alone” and wonders, “Was it something I was missing, or is there someone else?”)
“I’m so f—ing proud of the songwriting on ‘Welcome Mat,’” Ballerini says of the EP, which came out amid a wave of divorce albums by female country stars, including Kacey Musgraves and Carly Pearce. “I feel like I proved to myself my credibility — not just to myself, but especially to myself.” Yet she also realizes that her candor — in her music as well as in a very dishy episode of the popular “Call Her Daddy” podcast — came “at the expense of a lot of things,” she says. Meaning? “I hurt some people.”
Ballerini describes herself as “a classic oversharer.”
(Jennifer McCord / For The Times)
With “Patterns,” Ballerini’s fifth studio LP, her ambition was to maintain “the level of honesty that I unlocked” last time while “editing myself a little bit in terms of what I share about my real life.” For help she assembled a team of experienced songwriters: Hillary Lindsey, Jessie Jo Dillon, Karen Fairchild (of Little Big Town) and Alysa Vanderheym, who produced “Welcome Mat” and went on to produce the new album.
“They’re all amazing writers, but they’re also my friends,” Ballerini says, “so it felt comfortable to go in and just throw paint at the wall and figure it out.” The crew held a retreat at a friend’s farm to start the creative process and came up with “Sorry Mom,” “Two Things” and “Baggage,” in which Ballerini admits, “I don’t abide by that 50-pound limit.”
The fact that the team was all women meant that “we could definitely say things we would never say in other writing rooms,” Vanderheym says. “There was wine involved, and there were some very late nights. We were just spilling our guts.” For Ballerini, the liberation was sufficient to drop an F-bomb in one tune — hardly a given in country music. “I remember she was like, ‘Am I gonna have a little E on my record?’” Vanderheym says, referring to the symbol used by streaming services to show that a song contains explicit lyrics. (Ballerini also credits a woman not present for the retreat: “I would not have put ‘f—’ on this record,” she says, “had Taylor Swift not put ‘f—’ on a record.”)
The singer and Vanderheym recorded much of “Patterns” in Vanderheym’s living room in part because the singer is no fan of a professional studio’s vocal booth. “It just feels like I’m walking into a cubicle with a Dell computer that I don’t know how to work,” she says with a laugh. “When I do vocals now, I’m crisscross applesauce on the floor with a mic in my hand.”
For the album’s lead single, “Cowboys Cry Too,” Ballerini enlisted Noah Kahan, the folk-rock singer-songwriter from Vermont, whom she met at the Grammys in February. “I totally fan-girled on him, and then he asked me about ‘Peter Pan,’” she recalls. “I was like, ‘How do you even know that song?’” In “Cowboys,” Ballerini addresses the effects of “toxic masculinity,” as she puts it, but she felt the song would be more powerful “if it’s me opening the door and then a man actually talking about it from his perspective. So I just shot my shot and texted it to Noah.” Kahan wrote a moving verse about a guy un-learning the stoicism he inherited from his dad.
Says Ballerini: “Noah is what the song talks about, which is a man who’s not afraid to be cracked wide open and gush out.”
According to Ballerini, “Cowboys Cry Too” is “one of the two most country-radio-friendly songs I’ve ever put out.” (The other one is “If You Go Down [I’m Goin’ Down Too],” a cut from 2022’s “Subject to Change” LP that Ballerini co-wrote with McAnally.) Yet four months after it was released, “Cowboys” is stuck down in the high 30s on Mediabase’s closely watched country chart.
The singer is philosophical about “Cowboys’” performance. “I’ve had seven No. 1s on country radio, and now I can’t get one anymore,” she says. “Things just change, right?” She adds that she may never win female vocalist of the year at the Country Music Assn. Awards — a prize she’s been nominated for seven times, including at next month’s CMAs ceremony. “That’s probably the truth,” she says.
“But I’m in this phase of my career where there’s abundance in different ways,” not least the TV gigs and the concert she has booked Tuesday night at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where she plans to perform “Patterns” from beginning to end. “I’ve had to rewire exactly what success looks like. I’m working really hard, and I’m showing up, and that matters to me,” she says. “Whatever this ends up looking like, I’m open to it.”
